Retention is where most site networks quietly lose sponsors, and Tekton Research is betting that organizational structure is the fix. The Austin-founded site organization, which has supported more than 900 trials since 2006, reports a 95% average participant retention rate across completed studies, and the three vice presidents it hired this month are each, in different ways, meant to protect that number as the network grows.
The hires address two pressure points sponsors have raised directly. Patricia Brown, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who previously held a VP of clinical operations role at CNS Healthcare, takes over neuroscience operations across Tekton’s neurology and psychiatry sites. Kelli Wilson, who built up through site-level roles at Velocity Clinical Research and Eximia Research over roughly a decade, leads the cardiometabolic and endocrinology portfolios. Both are being brought in partly because more sponsors are now selecting multiple Tekton sites for a single trial, which creates coordination demands that a purely site-level structure struggles to absorb. Central operational leadership for multi-site studies is the specific problem these two roles are designed to solve.
The third hire, Stefanie Hunter as Vice President of Patient Strategy, addresses the recruitment side. Hunter spent more than 10 years in clinical trial recruitment, rising to senior director at Evolution Research Group before leading recruitment at Johnson County Clin-Trials. Tekton’s COO Taryn Collett has been explicit that bringing recruitment in-house improved efficiency but that specialty studies still depend on local, physician-patient relationships for both enrollment and retention. Hunter’s mandate is to align sponsors on recruitment and retention strategy earlier in the relationship, before the point where slippage typically starts.
The appointments coincide with concrete geographic and therapeutic expansion: Tekton recently opened its first Houston site, added a psychiatry principal investigator in San Antonio, and extended a MASH trial collaboration to its New Carlisle, Ohio, location. The practical test for this leadership structure will be whether that 95% retention rate holds as the number of simultaneous multi-site studies rises.
Source link: https://tektonresearch.com/tekton-adds-executive-leadership-across-key-therapeutic-areas-and-patient-engagement/
Moe Alsumidaie is Chief Editor of The Clinical Trial Vanguard. Moe holds decades of experience in the clinical trials industry. Moe also serves as Head of Research at CliniBiz and Chief Data Scientist at Annex Clinical Corporation.
